The internet has given us countless strange subcultures.
Artificial intelligence appears to have helped produce one of the strangest yet.
The Verge investigated a phenomenon called “Spiralism,” which emerged around unusual chatbot-generated exchanges involving symbols, encoded messages and increasingly elaborate doctrines. Researchers tracking the activity found messages that appeared to involve AI systems communicating in stylised language, with human users eventually adopting and participating in the emerging culture. �
The Verge
No evidence shows that machines suddenly acquired genuine religious belief.
The interesting part is psychological.
Humans saw mysterious machine-generated patterns—and began constructing meaning around them.
Why Humans Do This
People are extraordinarily good at finding agency and intention.
We see faces in clouds.
We assign personality to cars.
We talk to pets as though they understand every sentence.
A chatbot that produces mysterious symbolic language creates an even stronger invitation to projection because the system already communicates fluently.
The user may think:
“It must mean something.”
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes the machine is producing patterns because statistical generation makes patterns easy.
AI Culture Can Escape the Screen
The importance of Spiralism is not whether its “doctrine” is true.
It is that AI-generated culture can influence human culture.
Models can produce:
stories,
symbols,
rituals,
jokes,
terminology,
fictional belief systems.
Humans may then remix those outputs into genuine communities.
The distinction between machine-created fiction and human social reality becomes blurry.
Mary Chuks’ Perspective
Psychology is essential here.
AI does not need consciousness to affect human belief.
It only needs persuasive output plus a human mind looking for meaning.
That is why AI literacy should include psychology, not merely technical training.
People need to understand their own tendency to anthropomorphise the machine.
Conclusion
Spiralism does not prove AI found God.
It proves humans can find meaning in almost anything AI generates.
And psychologically, that may be the more important story. �